Another space company aims to mine asteroids

A team of entrepreneurs and engineers in the US have unveiled plans for a space mining company that would tap nearby asteroids for raw materials to fuel satellites and manufacture components in orbit.

Deep Space Industries, based in California, said its inaugural mission is targeted for 2015, when it would send a small hitchhiker spacecraft called Firefly on a six-month expedition to survey an as-yet-unidentified asteroid.

The 25-kilogram satellite, about the size of a laptop computer, would be launched as a secondary payload aboard a commercial rocket carrying a communications satellite or other robotic probe.

About 1,000 small asteroids relatively close to Earth are discovered every year.

Most, if not all, are believed to contain water and gases, such as methane, which can be turned into fuel, as well as metals such as nickel, which can be used in three-dimensional printers to manufacture components, according to David Gump, chief executive of Deep Space Industries.

Mr Gump is a co-founder of three previous space and technology start-ups, including Astrobotic Technology, which is focused on exploration and development of lunar resources.

"There is really nothing in the business plan that Deep Space Industries is pursuing that cannot be done with technology research already accomplished in laboratories across the planet," said John Mankins, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory manager who is the start-up company's chief technical officer.

"The technology may not have been used in space for the exact purposes that we propose, but the fundamental technologies are really at hand."

Deep Space Industries is the second company to unveil plans to mine asteroids.

Last year Planetary Resources, a Washington-based company backed by high-profile investors including Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and advisers like filmmaker James Cameron, announced a program that would begin with small, low-cost telescopes to scout for potentially lucrative asteroids.